When playing "cutthroat" bridge, wherein each of two or three players bids to make the same dummy hand his partner, or where two players bid for two different dummy hands (one to be played by each), accurate Slam bidding is presently not possible if all or any portion of the cards of the dummy hands are unexposed at the time of bidding. This is so because to bid for a Small Slam (taking of all but one of the normal thirteen tricks) or a Grand Slam (taking all tricks), it is ordinarily essential to know whether the slam bidder and his dummy partner together hold all or most of the Aces and Kings between their two hands. In other than my aforementioned. U.S. Pat. No. 4,009,884, this presently requires seeing the faces of the cards, which is undesirable from the standpoint of not being the "normal" type of bidding in the conventional game. Seeing the card faces is undesirable, because each player is then able to determine the strategic locations of all of the Aces and Kings held by his opponents and thus play his hand accordingly. The game is thus reduced to one in which bidding is based on the number of tricks which can be won and lost, rather than on the general point count and suit strength as in the standard four-handed Bridge game.
The game described in my previously-mentioned patent requires the use of a deck of cards with pre-printed backs for enabling the establishing of predetermined dummy hands. This means that at the start of each deal, the backs of all 52 cards must be examined to establish the 13 card dummy. While this takes but a minute or two, some players may find it objectionable. The present invention is designed to enable random dealing of hands without required specially printed backs with indicia for selecting the hands.